risc-v
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SiFive wants a bigger job inside the AI machine
The RISC-V pioneer sells the blueprints behind other companies’ chips. With $400 million in fresh funding and a new development server, it is making a bid for the data center’s CPU business.
Michael Gao Is Building a Chip for the Mathematics of Trust
A teenage encounter with Bitcoin taught Michael Gao what specialized silicon could do. Now he is trying to give zero-knowledge proofs and advanced cryptography a computer architecture of their own.
Bo Wang’s Second Act Is an Open Bet on Computing
After nearly a quarter-century inside Intel, Bo Wang crossed from an established chip platform to a young RISC-V company. His ESWIN chapter is a study in what it takes to turn an open instruction set into products, partnerships and an international business.
The AI Chip Company Betting the Future Won't Fit Inside One GPU
Tenstorrent is building AI computers from small, networked pieces - then opening the software so developers can see how the machine works. The wager is simple: in a market organized around one dominant GPU stack, flexibility can be a product.
SkyeChip
SkyeChip is a Penang-based fabless semiconductor company that designs silicon intellectual property (IP) and custom application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) for artificial intelligence and high-performance computing. Founded in 2019 by former Intel, Altera and Broadcom engineers, it specialises in advanced memory-interface IP (HBM3E, DDR5, LPDDR5/5x), UCIe die-to-die interconnect, network-on-chip fabrics and RISC-V CPU IP built on 6nm/7nm process nodes. Recognised as Malaysia's first homegrown AI chip designer, SkyeChip listed on Bursa Malaysia's Main Market in May 2026 in the country's largest IPO in 16 years.
Dave Kelf
Dave Kelf is the CEO of Breker Verification Systems, a San Jose-based EDA company whose test suite synthesis technology automates verification of large, complex chips including more than half of the world's RISC-V processor core projects. A UK-trained engineer turned marketing and business leader, Kelf spent three decades across Cadence, Synopsys, Co-Design Automation, Novas, and OneSpin, where he helped introduce and grow the SystemVerilog language and the Verdi debug environment. He rose from Breker's chief marketing officer to chief executive in October 2021 and has since guided the company through back-to-back years of 35 percent revenue growth.
XMOS
XMOS is a fabless semiconductor company based in Bristol, UK, that designs the XCORE family of multicore, deterministic processors for embedded voice, audio, AI and control at the edge. Founded in 2005 by a team rooted in the University of Bristol and Inmos transputer heritage, XMOS built its name on far-field voice processing (VocalFusion, the first far-field solution qualified for Amazon Alexa) and now positions XCORE as a 'Generative System-on-Chip' (GenSoC) - silicon whose behaviour can be described in natural language while guaranteeing real-time, deterministic performance.
ForwardEdge ASIC
ForwardEdge ASIC is a Saint Paul, Minnesota-based integrated circuit design house and wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin. It designs 100% domestically traceable custom ASICs and FPGAs - plus silicon IP and turnkey products - for defense, aerospace, space, cybersecurity, and commercial customers. Built by a team of veteran engineers who have worked together for more than 30 years, the company pairs startup speed with Fortune 100 stability and holds DMEA Trusted IC vendor status, positioning it as a secure onshore alternative for mission-critical microelectronics.
ESWIN Computing
ESWIN Computing is a Beijing-based chip company building system-on-chip products around the open RISC-V architecture. It designs edge-computing and AI SoCs - most notably the EIC77 series - pairs them with its own NPU and software stack, and sells them as chips and developer boards for smart home, automotive, industrial, and PC-class computing. It is the IC-and-solutions arm of the larger Beijing ESWIN Technology Group founded by former BOE chairman Wang Dongsheng.
Fabric Cryptography
Fabric Cryptography is a San Francisco hardware startup building the Verifiable Processing Unit (VPU) - a fully programmable custom-silicon chip with an instruction set designed specifically for advanced cryptography. Founded in 2021 by Michael Gao, Tina Ju, and Sagar Reddy, Fabric aims to do for cryptography what Nvidia did for AI: dramatically accelerate workloads like zero-knowledge proofs, fully homomorphic encryption, and multi-party computation compared with CPUs, GPUs, and fixed-function accelerators. The company has raised $39M total, including a $33M Series A in August 2024 co-led by Blockchain Capital and 1kx.
AheadComputing
AheadComputing is a Beaverton, Oregon semiconductor startup founded in 2024 by four former Intel CPU architects who left to build high-performance 64-bit RISC-V processor cores from a clean slate. Betting that the future bottleneck in AI and data-center computing is the CPU rather than the GPU, the company is designing a 'Big Core' out-of-order engine that maximizes per-core performance without the legacy baggage of x86. Backed by roughly $53M in seed funding from Eclipse, Toyota Ventures, Cambium and legendary chip designer Jim Keller, AheadComputing wants to prove that an open instruction set can deliver top-tier performance.
Debbie Marr
Dr. Debbie Marr is the co-founder, CEO and President of AheadComputing, a Beaverton, Oregon startup building high-performance 64-bit RISC-V CPU cores. A former Intel Fellow and Chief Architect of Intel's Advanced Architecture Development Group, she spent 33 years shaping processors from the i386 era to modern Core and Xeon chips, served as server architect of the Pentium Pro, turned Hyper-Threading from concept into shipping product on the Pentium 4, and was chief architect of the 4th Gen Core (Haswell). She holds a PhD from the University of Michigan, more than 40 patents and 30+ published papers, and in 2024 left Intel with three fellow architects to prove that open architectures can deliver top-tier performance because, in her words, everybody deserves better compute.
MIPS
MIPS is a San Jose-based semiconductor IP company with a 40-year heritage in RISC computing. After abandoning its own legacy architecture, MIPS reinvented itself around the open RISC-V instruction set and now builds compute subsystems for autonomous platforms across automotive, industrial, robotics, and edge AI markets. Its Atlas portfolio - spanning Sense, Think, Act, and Communicate building blocks - targets the low-latency, safety-critical demands of what the company calls Physical AI. In July 2025, GlobalFoundries announced a deal to acquire MIPS.
Sameer Wasson
Sameer Wasson is the CEO of MIPS, the storied semiconductor IP company now reborn as a RISC-V pure-play targeting the physical AI era. He joined in September 2023 after 18 years at Texas Instruments, where he ran the Processors business and earlier built TI's mmWave radar franchise. MIPS is now a subsidiary of GlobalFoundries.
Frank Ferrante
Frank Ferrante is the CEO of ForwardEdge ASIC, a Lockheed Martin subsidiary dedicated to advancing U.S. domestic semiconductor chip design. A 30-year veteran of the semiconductor industry, Ferrante has held leadership roles at Intel (Senior Director of Military, Aerospace and Government), Wolfspeed (VP of Worldwide Automotive Sales and Marketing), and Altera. He is a vocal advocate for U.S. advanced manufacturing policy, having advised policymakers on the CHIPS Act, SHIP, and RAMP-C initiatives. Under his leadership, ForwardEdge ASIC achieved U.S. Government Trusted IC Vendor Status in February 2026 and selected the MIPS S8200 for mission-critical autonomous platform ASICs.
Markos Georghiades
Markos Georghiades is an Engineering Partner at Andreessen Horowitz's crypto division (a16z crypto), where he focuses on cryptography and core development of Jolt - a16z's open-source zero-knowledge virtual machine (zkVM). An undergraduate studying Computer Science and Mathematics at the University of Waterloo, he has co-authored multiple research breakthroughs: helping Jolt achieve a 6x throughput speedup (over 1 million RISC-V cycles/sec), enabling true zero-knowledge proofs via the NovaBlindFold technique, and implementing 64-bit proving without performance slowdown. His GitHub bio - 'sumcheck is love sumcheck is life' - says everything you need to know about where his obsessions lie.